


Heartbeat of the pulsar

by astralelegies



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, F/F, Femslash February, I'm really all about the space thing as you can tell, IN SPACE!, Space Opera, but not all angsty?, read it and see - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:51:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6137205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralelegies/pseuds/astralelegies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myka Bering, an agent of the secretive Warehouse space station, is haunted by a restlessness she can't seem to shake. Then one day a mysterious woman drops out of the sky and into the most dangerous cargo hold in the galaxy, and Myka begins to break the rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heartbeat of the pulsar

Space is big. 

It’s the first thing they tell the new recruits at the academy, and back then it seemed obvious, but even though it’s years since her graduation and posting to a station off Praxis Minor Myka Bering still can’t get over the undeniable, inescapable vastness of the void. It continues to amaze her, that in all the infinity of the cosmos she has managed to find herself here, onboard this too-old assemblage of scrap metal orbiting the lesser moon of a border planet. 

“This is necessary for our line of work,” Artie will say, whenever the same stars start getting a little too familiar. “This is our secrecy.” 

And it’s always true. The Coalition government has many intelligence agencies, many operatives whose job relies solely on the carrying out of covert operations, and though the Warehouse is the least glamorous of them all it is perhaps the most important. And for Myka it’s enough, to be needed. 

It’s Rations Day, which only means the tri-annual drone delivery of supplies, but when Claudia first came she declared it a holiday and the rest of the base has gone along ever since. 

“Alright!” Pete grins, breaking open one of the boxes. “Space pizza! That’s almost half as good as regular pizza.” 

“I prefer space nachos myself,” Claudia says. 

All of it hovers somewhere above terrible in terms of culinary excellence, but it would be rude to spoil their fun. 

In addition to the food, there are other essentials. Toothpaste, soap, medical utilities, a new repair kit for each of them. (Those don’t come as often, the repair kits, which makes this Rations Day extra rad, in Claudia’s words.) They each have their own crate, too, items ordered from out of their own allowance and packages from home. Leena gets an ancient record player. Artie pulls out a box of very real (and by this point, very stale) cookies he pretends weren’t sent by Dr. Calder. Steve has a letter he refuses to let anyone see, but smiles to himself while reading when he thinks no one’s watching. Myka’s letter is from her sister. _We’re good, the store is good, dad is good. We are all missing you and hope you can come visit the next time you’re not off being a hero._

Claudia’s box contains the spare parts she sent out for, and nothing else. 

“I’m fine,” she says to Myka’s questioning look. “I just keep hoping something will come from home, someday. It’s stupid.” 

Claudia’s brother is still missing. Her parents died in one of the wars. She doesn’t talk about it. 

Later that evening marks the first visit of the traveler in the night. Myka is trying to sleep when she hears the noise. She’s always had a mind for details and the usual sounds of the station are no exception. Something is out of place. 

She slips slowly out of her bunk, making sure to clip her regulation pistol to her belt and slip on the softer of her two pairs of boots. Creeping down the hallway, near-silent amidst the gentle whirr of machinery, she listens for any sign of the irregularity’s source. The sound comes again, slightly louder this time, though not loud enough to be heard by the untrained ear. It’s coming from the direction of the cargo hold. 

At this point, there are two options. The first is that one of the many instruments they’ve gathered over the years in the line of duty has started going off, which could mean the end of the world.

The second option is worse. 

Myka quickens her pace, striding swiftly towards the door of the cargo hold, which opens with a muffled _whoosh_. It’s immediately clear to her that someone has been here who isn’t supposed to be, someone whose caution cannot hide their lack of knowledge about the proper layout of the Artifacts. 

Someone standing a few paces ahead of her. 

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the Coalition enforcers on you right now.”

The strange woman grins at her, raising her hands casually, almost flippantly, at Myka’s leveled gun. 

“Which reason would you like? I could threaten to blow up your base, or claim that I have a weapon concealed behind my back. Or perhaps I could pretend to be myself an agent of your Coalition, sent here in disguise on a secret mission. Have your pick.”

“What are you doing here?” 

“If you call the Coalition enforcers on me, you’ll never know. There’s your reason.” 

Myka takes a step forward. “And what if they manage to get it out of you?” 

“They won’t.”

“You sound very sure of that.” 

“Experience. You can put that gun down, you know. I’m not going to run.”

Myka doesn’t lower it. “There isn’t anywhere to run up here.”

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” the woman says, like it’s something she’s needed to say often but knows no one, including herself, will ever believe. “I’m Helena.” 

“This isn’t an easy place to find, Helena,” says Myka, and what she means is _the location was classified by the Coalition to keep enemies and imbeciles alike from wandering in_. “How did you?”

“Entirely by accident. I am merely a wayward traveler who happened upon what I thought was an abandoned station in the hopes of finding a place to stay the night. I haven’t been near an inhabitable planet in days.” 

Myka has to give her that. The nearest semblance of civilization is a system over. But she is smart, and she is a soldier, and this makes her wary. 

“And why were you traveling all the way out here?”

There’s that grin again. “For the adventure.” 

Myka can’t help a half-smile herself. “You might be looking in the wrong place, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I don’t know.” Helena steps closer to her. “I think I’ve found exactly what I’m looking for.” 

Myka lowers her gun slowly, but doesn’t holster it. Helena doesn’t move away. 

“Do you believe me now?”

“Not entirely,” Myka tells her. “Your story is improbable at best.”

“So am I,” says Helena, “and it has yet to stop me.”

There is something in her Myka is ashamed to admit she admires, this mystery woman with the moxie to waltz into the cargo hold of a protected Coalition facility and not care. 

“The door to this room was locked.”

“I was curious.” 

“So you broke in?”

“As I said, I didn’t think anyone lived here.” Helena turns her gaze to the rows of shelves, reaching out a tentative hand to hover a few inches from one of the instruments. “What is this place?”

“That’s none of your concern.” Myka takes hold of Helena’s outstretched fingers and drags her towards the door. “Come on.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Away.” Myka prods Helena’s shoulder with the tip of her gun. “And you’d better be quiet about it.”

The other woman moves so silently she could be a figment of Myka’s imagination, were it not for the gentle pressure of their still-linked hands. 

“You don’t need the gun,” Helena whispers. “If I wanted to escape I could take you out easily.”

“I’d like to see you try.” 

They come to Myka’s bunk. She frees her fingers from the other woman’s grasp and presses her palm to the identification plate, shoving Helena inside as the door opens. 

“You said you wanted a place to stay the night,” says Myka, “so stay. I’ll wake you before the others have time to get up and you can be on your way.”

“How charitable of you. What’s the catch?”

“There isn’t one. You stay here, I keep watch, and at 0600 hours, once I have determined you are neither stealing nor sabotaging anything, you will be on your way. And you’ll know not to return in the future.”

“A shame,” Helena murmurs, “I think I should very much like to return here.”

Myka doesn’t know how to respond to that. “Well…you can’t. Not unless you want Artie calling the Coalition out here to arrest you for trespassing.”

“I suppose that wouldn’t end well for me.” 

They don’t share further conversation. Helena curls up on Myka’s bunk and falls asleep almost instantly, and the soldier is struck by how vulnerable she looks. Something tells her this woman is anything but vulnerable in her waking life. 

The time inches by, and Myka is sure she’ll be tired when her shift starts, but she isn’t now. She feels more alert than she has in days, and it isn’t just the fact of her being on watch with custody of a suspicious person. New people rarely come to the Warehouse, and this one—something about this one makes her head spin. 

Before long she is waking Helena once more. The other woman sits up with a stretch, grins at her with only the faintest trace of sleep on her face, and they are on their way. Myka scans her with three different pieces of Warehouse technology, all determining she is clear of any Artifacts, and Helena rolls her eyes at the procedure while trying not to look too interested. At last Myka is satisfied that the visitor is not trying to carry anything off, and they find themselves at the doors to the airlock.

“I guess this is goodbye.”

Helena is standing in her neon orange flight suit, helmet tucked under one arm, head and smile both tilted to one side.

“So it is.” 

“I still don’t know your name.”

“It’s Agent Bering, and that’s all you need to know.”

Helena gives her a low, flamboyant bow. “I hope we meet again someday.”

Myka doesn’t answer that.

“Where’s your ship?” she asks instead.

“Oh Agent Bering.” Helena leans in close enough to whisper in her ear. “I can’t give away all of my secrets.”

In an instant she is separating them by sealing the entrance to the airlock behind her, securing her helmet, and opening the pressure doors.

She jumps into space.

\----

A few days pass and Myka does not hear from her, and nothing goes wrong. She accompanies Pete on an Artifact retrieval mission in the next system over and almost expects to find her there, hidden amongst the planet’s eight billion residents. The mission does not take them as long as she would like it to, and before long they are back at the base. 

The crew is eating breakfast together when Myka decides it is a good idea to tell Artie about Helena before he finds out for himself.

She takes a deep breath. “So about a week ago a woman landed on our base in the middle of the night looking for a place to stay and I let her.”

Artie spits out his space waffles. “And you didn’t think to mention this _sooner_?” 

“It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Didn’t seem—have you _completely_ taken leave of your senses?”

“She thought the place was abandoned. You know as well as I do there aren’t any inhabitable planets nearby.” 

“So you thought that made it okay for her to stay here?”

“Give me some credit, I held her at gunpoint.”

Artie knows that Myka is his best agent, at least when it comes to following protocol. He knows what she has sacrificed for the Warehouse, how capable this makes her when it comes to protecting the station. She sees his struggle with her confession playing out across his face. 

“I expected better of you,” he says quietly, and leaves the table.

And Myka knows she must be a terrible person, because underneath the pang of guilt, she cannot be sorry. 

\----

She wakes to someone knocking gently on the door to her bunk. Opening it, she is confronted with a startlingly familiar face. 

Helena stands in front of her, looking no different than the day she left. 

“Hello again.”

Myka just gapes. 

“Not even a greeting, I see.”

“What are you _doing_ here,” the agent hisses, recovering her senses.

Helena steps into the room, the door swishing closed behind her. “I came to see you, of course.”

“I thought I told you never to come back here.”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

Somehow Myka doubts that. She sinks into a chair, still a bit unable to process the fact that Helena is actually _here_ , again, in front of her. Dimly she knows that she will be in trouble for this, that Artie might actually kill her, and when she’s only now been starting to get back on his good side. She knows, too, that she is glad to see this woman, however she may try to deny it.

“It’s been months,” she says, “I didn’t think I’d see you again.” 

“Neither did I.”

And Myka realizes there is something different about Helena. She’s a little graver, a little more guarded. Something haunts her face, barely noticeable but for the corners of her eyes. 

“Sit down and tell me what’s happened.”

“Nothing’s happened,” Helena says, too cheerfully. “Everything’s fantastic.” 

She takes a seat anyway. 

“You’re going to get me fired,” Myka tells her.

“So don’t let them know I’m here.” 

“Then you’d better give me a good reason for breaking protocol.” 

Helena sighs. “Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you try to run from it your past is always one step ahead of you?”

“Sort of.” Myka frowns. “I don’t have a particularly dramatic past to be running from.”

“But everyone’s running from something.”

“That’s true.” 

“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so good at it.” 

They sit a few moments in silence. 

“I don’t know if you can call what I’m doing running,” Myka says suddenly. “Up here, everything is so…stationary. And I love the Warehouse, in my way, but I always wonder if there’s more out there for me.” 

It feels like a betrayal, of Pete and Claudia and Steve and Artie and Leena and this place, this place that has given her so much. 

“There is usually more out there,” says Helena grimly, “but that isn’t always a good thing.” 

Myka wants to ask her why she’s considering all these things, why tonight, but something holds her back. 

“Do you want to stay the night?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble.”

“It is far more trouble than necessary.” Myka tosses her a pillow. “But you might as well.”

She keeps watch, like last time, wakes her early, like last time. There are the three scans and then Helena jumps through the airlock. Myka still hasn’t seen her ship.

Later, in the brief minutes she has before the rest of the crew gets up, she remembers to wipe the footage from Claudia’s surveillance cameras, just like the younger woman showed her. It’s good that she’s always been an early riser. 

All during the day refraining from mentioning Helena is almost more than she can manage, both because she finds she wants to talk about the other woman and because she knows she should tell Artie. It would be the right thing to do. A few months ago it would have been the _only_ thing to do, in her mind, but even since then she’s changed and when she remembers the look on Helena’s face she is glad to keep her silence.

Two weeks later she comes again, and Myka isn’t even surprised. She pretends to be furious on principle, but Helena sees through her in an instant. 

She is still upset about something, Myka can tell, but she doesn’t dare ask. This time, because she has been losing sleep recently and if she continues the pattern she’ll lose any sense of efficiency as well, she does not keep watch. Instead she shares the bunk with Helena.

“It’s big enough for two,” she says, “and you can’t sneak off if I’m next to you.”

But she’s stopped really believing that Helena is here on some ominous secret mission. At this point it doesn’t seem very likely. 

Work is slow the next day. There are no notifications of any potential Artifacts nearby, and they’re almost finished indexing the instruments for the month. Myka finds herself sitting in a corner of the cargo hold with Pete and Claudia and Steve, slacking off, a behavior which she ordinarily would not tolerate but for the moment lets slide. 

“What I want is a nice girl to come sweep me off this station.” Claudia leans back in her chair, eyes closed. “What do you think? We could find a nice, quiet planet together, settle down, raise a family.”

Steve snorts. “You, settled down? That’ll be the day.” 

“Might be nice,” says Pete wistfully. “What about you, Myks? You after a girl to get you out of here too?”

Myka rolls her eyes at him, but inside she is thinking _Helena was in my room last night_ and _Helena said she’d come again_. 

“You do have a family, you know,” Pete is saying to Claudia, “you have us.”

“I know.” Claudia stands, stretching. “I just want to eat something that tastes like real food for once.” She turns to Steve. “Race you to the nebula aisle.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Steve says, and takes off running. 

\----

The next time Helena visits Myka takes her to the observation deck. 

“You’ve probably seen these stars closer than I have,” she says apologetically, “but it’s the best view in the station.”

“Beats the porthole in your closet of a room.” Helena curls against her on the lounge. “But your couch is more comfortable.”

“If you’re going to complain about my hospitality I’ll throw you out of the airlock myself.”

“Your death threats are always so pleasant.”

Myka has seen the stars outside this window a thousand thousand times, enough to know them in all their rotations almost by heart. They look different tonight. Seeing them through Helena’s eyes is different, and she is comforted, for once, by the intense familiarity of the Warehouse around her. 

“Are you ever going to tell me what this place is?” Helena asks.

_I can’t_ , Myka should say.

“You’re a smart person. Figure it out yourself.” 

“I have yet to find markings that bear any kind of specificity,” Helena observes. “Curiously enough, it’s even free of the Coalition’s official insignia, which means that the government doesn’t want anyone to know that this is here. Am I right so far?”

“Maybe,” Myka says, and smiles. 

“I should have known better than to get myself entangled with such a woman of mystery.”

Myka’s face flushes. “We’re hardly entangled. You keep breaking into my workplace. I’ve been wondering how you manage that, by the way. Claudia’s alarm system is the most advanced this side of the cosmos.”

“It’s very impressive,” Helena agrees, “but I know alarm systems.”

This should probably be a red flag. Hearing this, Myka should probably unholster her gun and march Helena to the brig for questioning (because she likes to think she still has some sense left in her). But she only laughs. 

“Maybe I’ll tell Claudia she needs to update her program. What would you do then?”

“I’d find a way,” says Helena. “Maybe you’d give me a key.”

“Never gonna happen.” 

Myka has never been a rebel. Pete often accuses her of not being spontaneous enough, and it may very well be true, but in this instance it only serves to spark in her a small sense of pride. She can break the rules, and no one needs to know. She can keep everything under control. 

It’s not as simple as all that, of course. Now that Helena’s visits aren’t confined to her bunk, it’s more difficult to keep her a secret. Myka is increasingly grateful for how often Claudia boasts about her inventions—it makes it slightly easier to erase the evidence. But no matter how hard she scans the security footage, she catches no sight of Helena until the other woman is right outside her door. 

And Claudia is sharper than she lets on. Helena would like her, Myka thinks, because Claudia is daring and clever and more than a little reckless in exactly the same way. 

“I think something’s wrong with my equipment,” she tells Myka one day. “There’s been some weird cuts lately where there shouldn’t be.” 

“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” Myka says.

“Probably.” Claudia frowns. “I do have my reputation as this station’s resident technology genius to uphold.”

Smarter than she lets on indeed. 

Helena comes at least once every few weeks now. Myka doesn’t know how she manages it, doesn’t ask, but she awaits their nighttime rendezvous with increasing anticipation. It’s rather alarming. 

Leena stops her in the hall one day, a look of concern on her face, and for a moment Myka’s afraid she’s found out because Leena tends to know everything. Instead Leena tells her that her aura seems different lately. 

“Has anything happened?”

“You know me,” Myka says, “nothing ever happens.”

“You seem…distracted. Happy.” Leena smiles at her softly. “It’s a good thing. Are you sure there haven’t been any major changes in your life recently?”

“I’m sure,” Myka lies. “Steve’s been teaching me to meditate.”

“That’s nice of him,” Leena says, like she wants to say more. Myka avoids her eyes. 

“I have to go do…things. Work. With Pete.”

She tries not to run away. 

About a month later she and Helena are making space nachos in the galley when Myka comes to a realization.

“As of tomorrow night, it’ll be exactly one year since we’ve known each other.”

“Time flies.” Helena toasts her with a packet of freeze-dried cheese. “To our anniversary.”

“Our _almost_ anniversary,” Myka corrects her. 

“To our _almost_ anniversary, then.”

Helena dumps the cheese unceremoniously into the cooker and turns to Myka, and the agent becomes aware of how close they are standing. Very close. It’s very close. Far closer than necessary, probably, and much closer than usual, certainly, and suddenly Myka forgets all these things because Helena is kissing her. 

She realizes, after a few moments, that she is kissing _back_ , and steps away quickly. They avoid each other’s eyes. 

“I wish you could stay,” Myka says quietly. “Not just tonight, I mean, tomorrow, our anniversary, the rest of the month.”

“I can’t.” Helena is staring out of the window with the unspeakably ancient expression she wears when she is lost in thought. “I have to go.”

Myka does not say _already?_ She nods. Their space nachos are left forgotten on the table. 

Too soon they arrive, once more, at the airlock. They face each other with a rather uncharacteristic awkwardness.

“Goodbye, Helena.”

“Goodbye, Agent Bering.”

“It’s Myka. You can call me Myka.”

Helena pauses, the ghost of a smile flickering across her lips. “Goodbye, Myka.”

The door closes between them.

\----

Myka tries to forget all of it the next day. It’s Rations Day, and the crew is in high spirits, even if lately some of that seems a bit forced. The drone delivers the usual supplies, plus their personal effects—Myka has another letter from her sister, Steve one from whatever mystery man Claudia has been pestering him about since last time, and Artie receives more cookies from Dr. Calder. Claudia hesitates before opening her box. 

“What the hell,” she mutters, and does so.

She drops it an instant later. She is very pale.

“What is it?” Myka asks, going to her. 

“A letter.” 

She picks it up with shaking fingers and everyone knows how important this is, because Claudia has been working on the base for three years and she’s never gotten a letter before. Slowly she unfurls the paper and scans its contents, features a mask. Then without even blinking she crumples it into a ball and shoves it into her back pocket.

“What does it say?” Leena ventures tentatively.

“That my brother is dead.”

All the air seems to go out of the room. 

“They say he died in a lab accident. He was working on teleportation.” She lets out a strangled laugh. “He always said he was ready to give his life in the name of science.”

Myka takes a step forward. “Claudia, I—I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t believe it.” Claudia turns away from them to face the observatory window. “Josh is an idiot, but he’s not stupid enough to die in one of his own experiments.”

“Anyone can die in an accident,” Steve says softly. He moves towards her. She steps away. 

“Not Joshua.”

“He’s dead, Claudia,” says Artie. 

She rounds on him. “What do you know about it?”

“Too much.”

“I’m going to find him. I’m going to find out what really happened.”

She makes to leave and Artie blocks her.

“Get out of my way.”

“I can’t let you do this.” 

“None of this concerns you. Let me _go_ , Artie.”

“ _No_.”

She tries to shove him aside but he stands, arms folded, like a stone. And then she begins to cry, silently, burying her head in his shoulder.

\----

The Warehouse is subdued after that. Claudia walks in a stoic haze, barely speaks, barely leaves her room but for work, and even Steve has little luck in getting through to her.

“She needs to process everything before she can grieve,” Leena says, and maybe it’s true, but Myka thinks Claudia is planning something.

It’s more than a month after the letter that Myka opens her door in the middle of the night to find Helena standing outside of it.

“Hello again.”

Myka lets her in wordlessly. 

“How have you been?” Helena asks, and there is a note Myka has never heard in her voice before—fear.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again.” 

“I didn’t think I’d come.” Helena grabs her hand. “Here I am.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Myka says, even as her heart is threatening to beat its way through her chest and run a marathon. 

“I had to see you,” Helena says, and kisses her.

The door opens. 

“Put up your hands.”

Helena backs away slowly, raises her arms at Artie’s voice. “Congratulations. You’ve caught me.”

He has one of the most powerful Artifacts on the base pointed at her. Myka is alarmed. 

“Artie, what is this?”

“You don’t get to ask the questions,” he growls. “Traitors do not get to say anything.”

She staggers. “I—what?”

“I’m sorry, Myka,” Helena says, and the regret in her voice is sickening. 

“This isn’t happening,” Myka murmurs. 

Artie hears her. 

“It is happening. And it’s all your fault. Do you know who it is you’ve been smuggling into the Warehouse? _Do you_?”

“I haven’t been smuggling her in,” Myka says. “She does that herself.”

“ _H.G. Wells_ , Myka. The notorious ex-Coalition criminal Helena G. Wells.”

Myka shakes her head. “No. You can’t be—

“I am.” Helena looks at the floor. “I would have told you, but, well…

“But you were planning to rob us.” Artie jabs the gun at her. “Did you tell Agent Bering that? Or did she conspire to stab us in the back with you?”

“Myka didn’t know anything about it.”

“You’re dead,” says Myka. “You’ve been dead for over a hundred and fifty years.”

“Not dead. Sleeping.” 

“The Coalition High Order put her into cryogenesis as punishment for her misdeeds,” Artie explains. 

“And does it ever say _why_ in any of your history books?” Helena fumes, still afraid, but angry as well now. “I _begged_ them to put me in that cryochamber. And for what great crime? What harrowing act of treason did I commit to be known throughout the galaxies as one of the Coalition’s worst enemies? I got reckless. Some people died. I took responsibility.”

“Everything you say is a lie,” Artie tells her. 

“Only if you believe it to be.” 

“So then why would you try to steal from the Warehouse?” Myka demands. “I’m guessing you knew about this place all along. Why rope me into it?”

Helena can’t look at her. “All I wanted was a time machine. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“And yet it did.”

“I got reckless.” 

She brings her eyes up to meet Myka’s, then, and they are filled with agony and regret and a terrible hope, and Myka doesn’t look away, even as Artie marches H.G. Wells to the brig. 

\----

Helena is carted off to await the mercy (or lack thereof) of the Coalition High Order, and Myka receives no punishment. She asks Artie if she should turn herself in and he snorts angrily.

“You will stay here and continue your work. And you will forget that Helena Wells even existed.”

After that he doesn’t speak to her. In the end, it isn’t his silence that’s hard to bear, but the combined quiet pressing in on her from every angle. Pete can hardly manage to be in the same room as her—every time she enters a place he makes an excuse and leaves it just as quickly. Steve and Leena try to act as stony as the others but catch themselves slipping, sometimes, almost granting her something in the shadow of a kind word before realizing their mistake and sinking back into stillness.

And Claudia—Claudia hasn’t looked at her in days. Myka takes to doing inventory by herself, going through the motions of missions with as little contact with the others as possible. She feels like she has betrayed them all. But she does not call herself a traitor, because she knows what the Coalition does to traitors. She wonders if this makes her a coward. 

She is on the observation deck one night, yet another sleepless stargaze, when the news feed built into the wall flashes and the headline reads _H.G. Wells has escaped custody, has stolen a ship and fled the High Order_. Before she knows what she is doing she is in the hangar bay, suitcase slung over her arm, staring at the array of smaller ships they use for their planetary adventures. 

A hand clasps her wrist and she jolts.

“Take me with you,” says Claudia. 

“You aren’t mad at me for leaving?”

“You want to find your missing person. I want to find mine.”

They board a ship together, and Myka tries not to think about Steve and Artie and Leena and Rations Day and terrible space pizza parties. 

Claudia drops into the copilot’s chair and starts the ignition. They fly together into the dark.

Myka doesn’t look back.


End file.
